I’ve never heard of West Side Story before. When I was researching it and saw it was related to Romeo and Juliet, I instantly related to it a lot. During my freshman English class, we went over the whole performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was a great story with lots of turns so I was excited to go out and watch West Side Story.

I’ve been to performances at the Des Moines Area Community Playhouse and at the Civic Center, but those were when I was little and didn’t understand much. Now that I am much older, I was looking forward to actually paying attention and understanding the real meaning of theatre.

I was very excited to see this cast was very popular and  has won many awards including a multiple Tony’s. I was nervous going to it, but knowing some of the storyline it followed from being experienced with Romeo and Juliet made it a lot easier to follow and understand.

Even if a person was new to this show, you could tell the cast was making it easy to follow along. They were definitely all experienced and it made it fun to watch and you couldn’t take your eyes off of it. As far as my experience, it was different sitting in an audience full of theatre-lovers. I am sure a lot of the people at the venue were not first-time play watchers. Being surrounded made me blend in and it was still easy to watch the stage and not the surrounding people.

My first thoughts after the play was over was that those kids were way too young to perform that well. It was amazing how kids younger than me could trick your mind into thinking they were someone else for a night. My favorite part of the whole performance was all the fun and exciting dancing. Every scene or every other scene there was some sort of fun dance and snapping. All of the singing was great but the one problem was in the second scene the music was a little loud compared to Tony’s voice and it was hard to hear them.

The costumes were great because you could tell who was part of the Jets and who was the Sharks just by the way they looked. Also, everyone on the Sharks had great Puerto Rican accents which made it fun and easy to tell who was who.

The play was great. It was fun and entertaining yet suspenseful. Some parts were really scary and then others were happy. It was a great rollercoaster of fun the whole time.  I really recommend going and seeing this play before it’s over with on October 30th.

The next play at the Des Moines Area Community Playhouse is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starting on December 12th.